People who had higher scores for sleep health — based on regularity, satisfaction, alertness, timing, efficiency and duration — during a 12-month weight loss program were more likely to follow the caloric intake and exercise components of the program in comparison to peers who scored lower for sleep health.
People with better sleep health attended more of the program’s group sessions.
People who reported getting regular, uninterrupted sleep did a better job sticking to their exercise and diet plans while trying to lose weight, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology, Prevention, Lifestyle & Cardiometabolic Health Scientific Sessions 2023. The meeting was held in Boston, February 28-March 3, 2023, and offered the latest science on population-based health and wellness and implications for lifestyle and cardiometabolic health.
“Focusing on obtaining good sleep — seven to nine hours at night with a regular wake time along with waking refreshed and being alert throughout the day — may be an important behavior that helps people stick with their physical activity and dietary modification goals,” said Christopher E. Kline, Ph.D., an associate professor in the department of health and human development at the University of Pittsburgh. “A previous study of ours reported that better sleep health was associated with a significantly greater loss of body weight and fat among participants in a year-long, behavioral weight loss program.”
The researchers examined whether good sleep health was related to how well people adhered to the various lifestyle modifications prescribed in a 12-month weight loss program. The weight-loss program included 125 adults (average age of 50 years, 91% female, 81% white) who met criteria for overweight or obesity (body mass index of 27-44) without any medical conditions requiring medical supervision of their diet or physical activity.
“There’s no evidence that you can oversleep,” said the Medical School’s Elizabeth Klerman. “Unlike chocolate cake you can eat when you’re not hungry, there’s no evidence you can sleep when you’re not tired.”
Experts from Harvard, Columbia University, the University of Miami, and the University of Massachusetts detailed the health implications of sleep in a conversation with CNN health reporter Jacqueline Howard on Thursday at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“Sleep in many ways is associated with mortality — cardiovascular disease, diabetes, mental health, brain health, immune function, respiratory conditions, and cognitive function and performance,” said Azizi Seixas, an associate professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
He and other panelists explored the health risks of long-term sleep deprivation and the fundamental role sleep plays in memory. According to Rebecca Spencer, a professor of psychology and brain science at UMass, “When you sleep, you’re taking this movie of your day and you’re putting it on replay, and it’s this great mnemonic device. It’s a way to really solidify the memories that we formed during our day.”
Those memories might include noise and other disruptions, introducing a wider challenge: While getting enough rest is important for everyone, the world can get in the way. Panelists zeroed in on noise pollution, racial disparities in sleep, and how policy decisions can leave us tired and vulnerable.
“We know, for example, that marginalized communities and racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in neighborhoods with socioeconomic disadvantage,” said Carmela Alcántara, an associate professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work. “That can include neighborhoods that might have higher policing, neighborhoods that then have greater exposure to noise pollution, greater exposure to light pollution, and all these factors which we know impact short-term sleep and then can have these cascading long-term effects on sleep.”
Sometimes we wake up feeling alert, alive, and ready to face the day – while other mornings we struggle to pull back the duvet and get out of bed. The reason is often clear: a late night making us less alert, or a calming bedtime routine giving us a good night’s sleep. Now a new study, published in Nature Communications, finds that there are a number of factors that impact both how we wake up and how alert we feel for the rest of the morning – and the good news is that they are almost all things we can control.
Participants were 870 adults from the UK and 95 from the United States. Most participants were twins, which allowed the researchers to explore the genetic contributions to our morning alertness and determine whether changeable or innate factors were more important.
First, participants completed various baseline questionnaires, including measures of how well they normally slept, how much caffeine and alcohol they consumed, and how much exercise they got. They also indicated whether they had ever received a diagnosis of depression or anxiety.
The study then took place across the course of two weeks. Every day for breakfast, participants consumed standardized test meals which differed in nutritional composition – for example, some were higher in carbs, some in fat, some in protein and some in fiber. At several points each morning after breakfast, they rated how alert they were. During the day and night, they also wore physical activity monitors, to gauge how much physical activity they got and how long they slept. Participants also recorded other dietary intake each day on an app.
The rate of parental stress is greater among parents who have sleep disorders themselves, or have children with sleep disorders, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Ray Merrill and Kayla Slavik of Brigham Young University, US, and colleagues.
Sleep and stress disorders are known to have a two-way correlation, with stress promoting sleep disorders and sleep disorders promoting stress. Among parents, there is thought to be a complex interplay between their own sleep, stress, mood and fatigue and their children’s’ sleep.
In the new work, the researchers analyzed data on 14,009 employees insured by Deseret Mutual Benefit Administrator (DMBA) in 2020, all of whom had dependent children. Overall, 2.2% of the employees filed medical claims for treating stress and 12.5% filed claims for treating a sleep disorder, including insomnia, hypersomnia or sleep apnea. 2.0% of children filed one or more medical claims for a sleep disorder.
The researchers found that, after adjusting for age, sex and marital status, rates of stress are 1.95 (95% CI 1.67-2.28) times greater in employees with a sleep disorder. Specifically, rates of stress are 3.00 (95% CI 2.33-4.85) times greater for those with insomnia and 1.88 (1.59-2.22) times greater for those with sleep apnea. In addition, the rate of employee stress is 1.90 (95% CI 1.33-2.72) times greater if their child has any sleep disorder, and 2.89 (95% CI 2.20-3.80) times greater if their child has insomnia. The study also found that if a child has a sleep disorder, the rate of parental insomnia and sleep apnea are both nearly doubled.
The authors conclude that a better understanding of the connections between parent and child sleep quality and parent stress may help improve treatment and lower the risk of these disorders.
Call it a health numbers game. Knowing just a few key metrics can provide a pretty accurate picture of your current cardiac fitness—and give you ongoing motivation to maintain healthy heart numbers and improve less healthy ones.
“It’s important to remember that all of these numbers fall on a continuous scale,” says Johns Hopkins cardiologist Michael Blaha, M.D., M.P.H.“It’s not enough to say you have high or low blood pressure—your doctor is looking at how high or how low.”
How many steps you take per day? Moving a lot improves every other heart-health measure and disease risk, says Blaha. That’s why he often urges walking up to 10,000 steps a day, or almost five miles. Another rule of thumb is to exercise 150 minutes per week. “It’s better to be active than inactive,” Blaha says.
Your blood pressureHigh blood pressure, or hypertension, has no symptoms; it can only be detected by being measured. A score of 120/80 is optimal, and 140/90 is normal for most people. Higher readings mean that arteries aren’t responding right to the force of blood pushing against artery walls (blood pressure), directly raising the risk of heart attack or stroke.
Your non-HDL cholesterol That’s your total cholesterol reading minus your HDL (high-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, a measure of fats in the blood that can narrow and clog arteries to the heart. Lower is better: Aim for a score lower than 130 mg/dL or, if you’re at a high risk of heart disease, lower than 70–100 mg/dL.
Your blood sugar High blood sugar ups your risk of diabetes, which damages arteries. In fact, type 1 and type 2 diabetes are among the most harmful risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
How many hours of sleep a night you get Although there’s no one “right” answer for all, consistently getting the number of hours that works for you helps lower the risk of heart disease, Blaha says. Most people need to sleep six to eight hours a night.
While I promote keeping your body moving and avoiding a sedentary lifestyle, it is nevertheless true that when it comes to resting, we need our sleep.
Nine in ten people do not get a good night’s sleep, according to research presented at ESC Congress 2022. The study found that sub-optimal sleep was associated with a higher likelihood of heart disease and stroke. The authors estimated that seven in ten of these cardiovascular conditions could be prevented if everyone were a good sleeper.
“The low prevalence of good sleepers was expected given our busy, 24/7 lives,” said study author Dr. Aboubakari Nambiema of INSERM (the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research), Paris, France. “The importance of sleep quality and quantity for heart health should be taught early in life when healthy behaviors become established. Minimizing night-time noise and stress at work can both help improve sleep.”
Previous studies on sleep and heart disease have generally focused on one sleep habit, such as sleep duration or sleep apnea, where breathing stops and starts while sleeping. In addition, prior studies have often assessed sleep at baseline only. The current study used a healthy sleep score combining five sleep habits. The researchers investigated the association between the baseline sleep score, and changes over time in the sleep score, and incident cardiovascular disease.
A good night’s sleep can be hard to come by when you wake up in a pool of sweat. But getting to the bottom of what’s causing night sweats is often difficult, says Kathleen Rowland, MD, MS, a family medicine specialist at RUSH.
Most of the time, night sweats are harmless, she says. But occasionally, they can be a sign that you’ve caught the flu, COVID-19 or another bug. “Almost any kind of infection can cause night sweats,” she says. This includes kidney infections and much rarer infections like tuberculosis.
In other cases, the cause may be thyroid or liver disease, or a sleep disorder like obstructive sleep apnea. Night sweats can also be a symptom of a serious health issue like lymphoma, a type of cancer that affects lymph nodes, bone marrow and other parts of the lymphatic system.
“While night sweats are a common symptom for people with lymphoma, very few people who have night sweats have cancer,” Rowland explains.
Regular readers know that I am an old man and very highly value a good night’s sleep. That is not the way I felt 20 years ago when I was in the working world. In those days I felt strongly that sleep was an intrusion on my life and activities and resented having to do it. I got a little wiser as the years went by. Please check out my Page – How important is a good night’s sleep? for significantly more details on this very important aspect of living a long healthy life.
Losing sleep in favor of some good holiday fun a few times each year is nothing to worry about, but chronic sleep deprivation can have adverse health effects. Some of us are affected more than others, however, and new research helps us understand why. For some of us, it may be harder to perform certain cognitive tasks after a sleepless night.
With 50 to 70 million adults in the United States having a “sleep or wakefulness disorder,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) consider sleep deprivation a “public health concern.”
Sleep loss is especially alarming given its status as a significant risk factor for traffic accidents and medical mishaps, as well as posing a danger to one’s health.
Insufficient sleep could increase the risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and cancer, among others conditions. Cognitively, sleep deprivation has a wide range of adverse effects. In fact, the CDC report that 23.2 percent of U.S. adults aged 20 and above have trouble concentrating, and another 18.2 percent say that they have trouble remembering things as a result of losing sleep.
However, new research shows that the cognitive effects of sleep loss vary from person to person, and that these differences may be down to our genetic makeup.
Scientists led by Paul Whitney, who is a professor of psychology at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman, found a genetic variation that explains why some people perform certain cognitive tasks a lot better than others after they have been sleep deprived.
The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Testing the effects of sleep deprivation
Whitney and colleagues examined the cognitive abilities of 49 healthy adults who were aged 27, on average. Of these adults, 34 were assigned to a sleep deprivation group, while 15 were assigned to a control group. The former went for a period of 38 hours without sleep, while the controls slept normally.
To test the participants’ cognitive abilities, the researchers asked them to complete a task before and after the intervention, using a computer screen and a mouse.
The purpose of the task was to assess flexible attentional control by testing the participants’ ability to correctly click the left mouse button when they see a certain letter combination on the screen, and the right mouse button for all the other letter pairs. Participants were instructed to perform the task as quickly and accurately as possible. Importantly, in the middle of the experiment, they were suddenly asked to switch and click the left mouse button for another letter combination.
Whitney and team also performed genotype analyses on the participants and divided the sleep-deprived group into three subgroups, based on three variants of a gene called DRD2.
The DRD2 gene is a dopaminergic receptor that regulates information processing in a brain area associated with cognitive flexibility.
Gene variant protects from sleep loss effects
After the attentional “switch” in the middle of the task, some participants became confused and performed poorly at the “new” task.
However, participants with a particular variation of the DRD2 gene performed just as well as the control group. Study co-author Hans Van Dongen, director of the WSU Sleep and Performance Research Center, explains the significance of the findings, saying, “Our research shows this particular gene influences a person’s ability to mentally change direction when given new information.”
“Some people are protected from the effects of sleep deprivation by this particular gene variation but, for most of us, sleep loss does something to the brain that simply prevents us from switching gears when circumstances change,” Van Dongen says.
Whitney also weighs in on the findings, saying: “Our work shows that there are people who are resilient to the effects of sleep deprivation when it comes to cognitive flexibility. Surprisingly these same people are just as affected as everyone else on other tasks that require different cognitive abilities, such as maintaining focus.” “This confirms something we have long suspected,” he adds, “namely that the effects of sleep deprivation are not general in nature, but rather depend on the specific task and the genes of the person performing the task.” “Our long-term goal is to be able to train people so that no matter what their genetic composition is, they will be able to recognize and respond appropriately to changing scenarios, and be less vulnerable to sleep loss,” Whitney concludes.
Getting less than five hours of sleep in mid-to-late life could be linked to an increased risk of developing at least two chronic diseases, finds a new study led by University College London (UCL) researchers.
The research, published in PLOS Medicine, analysed the impact of sleep duration on the health of more than 7,000 men and women at the ages of 50, 60 and 70, from the Whitehall II cohort study.
Researchers examined the relationship between how long each participant slept for, mortality and whether they had been diagnosed with two or more chronic diseases (multimorbidity) — such as heart disease, cancer or diabetes — over the course of 25 years.
People who reported getting five hours of sleep or less at age 50 were 20% more likely to have been diagnosed with a chronic disease and 40% more likely to be diagnosed with two or more chronic diseases over 25 years, compared to people who slept for up to seven hours.
Study using the American Heart Association framework provides evidence that sleep is integral to preserving heart health.
Researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health evaluated an expanded measure of cardiovascular health (CVH) that includes sleep as an eighth metric, in relation to cardiovascular disease risk. This represents the first examination of adding sleep to the American Heart Association’s original Life’s Simple 7 (LS7) metrics as a novel eighth metric of CVH. The study is published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
Photo by Acharaporn Kamornboonyarush on Pexels.com
The study sample consisted of ~2000 middle-aged to older adults from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), an ongoing U.S. study of CVD and CVD risk factors, who participated in a sleep exam and provided comprehensive data on their sleep characteristics.
The research evaluated multiple expanded cardiovascular health scores –including the American Heart Association’s Life’s Simple 7 (LS7) metrics — plus different sleep health measures, to evaluate which sleep parameters should be prioritized for CVD prevention. This study is the first to show that sleep metrics add independent predictive value for CVD events over and above the original 7 CVH metrics.
Importantly, cardiovascular health scores that included sleep duration only as a measure of overall sleep health as well as cardiovascular health scores that included multiple dimensions of sleep health (i.e. sleep duration, efficiency, and regularity, daytime sleepiness, and sleep disorders) were both predictive of future CVD. For the sleep duration metric, sleeping 7 hours or more but less than 9 hours each night was considered indicative of ideal sleep health.
Adjusting to a new sleep schedule at the start of the school year can lead to disturbed rest, daytime fatigue and changes in mood and focus for teens.
Although they need eight to 10 hours of sleep per night to maintain physical health, emotional well-being and school performance, according to the National Sleep Foundation and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, most adolescents get less than eight, especially on school nights.
Newly published research from RUSH in the journal SLEEP sheds light on how adolescents can get more shut-eye.
“There are a lot of changes a teen goes through,” said Stephanie J. Crowley, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the director of the Pediatric Chronobiology and Sleep Research Program at RUSH. “One specifically is a change to sleep biology that happens during puberty.”
Getting a consistent good night’s sleep supports normal production and programming of hematopoietic stem cells, a building block of the body’s innate immune system, according to a small National Institutes of Health-supported study in humans and mice. Sleep has long been linked to immune function, but researchers discovered that getting enough of it influenced the environment where monocytes – a type of white blood cell – form, develop, and get primed to support immune function. This process, hematopoiesis, occurs in the bone marrow.
“What we are learning is that sleep modulates the production of cells that are the protagonists – the main actors – of inflammation,” said Filip K. Swirski, Ph.D., a senior study author and director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City. “Good, quality sleep reduces that inflammatory burden.”
Humans help each other — it’s one of the foundations of civilized society. But a new study by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, reveals that a lack of sleep blunts this fundamental human attribute, with real-world consequences.
Lack of sleep is known to be associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, depression, diabetes, hypertension and overall mortality. However, these new discoveries show that a lack of sleep also impairs our basic social conscience, making us withdraw our desire and willingness to help other people.
Humans help each other — it’s one of the foundations of civilized society. But a new study by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, reveals that a lack of sleep blunts this fundamental human attribute, with real-world consequences.
A new study by UC Berkeley scientists shows how sleep loss dramatically reduced the desire to help others, triggered by a breakdown in the activity of key prosocial brain networks.
Lack of sleep is known to be associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, depression, diabetes, hypertension and overall mortality. However, these new discoveries show that a lack of sleep also impairs our basic social conscience, making us withdraw our desire and willingness to help other people.
In one portion of the new study, the scientists showed that charitable giving in the week after the beginning of Daylight Saving Time, when residents of most states “spring forward” and lose one hour of their day, dropped by 10% — a decrease not seen in states that do not change their clocks or when states return to standard time in the fall.
Napping, as well as sleeping too much or too little or having poor sleep patterns, appears to increase the risk for cardiovascular disease in older adults, new research shows.
The study, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, adds to a growing body of evidence supporting sleep’s importance to good health. The American Heart Association recently added sleep duration to its checklist of health and lifestyle factors for cardiovascular health, known as Life’s Essential 8. It says adults should average seven to nine hours of sleep a night.
Photo by Acharaporn Kamornboonyarush on Pexels.com
“Good sleep behavior is essential to preserve cardiovascular health in middle-aged and older adults,” said lead author Weili Xu, a senior researcher at the Aging Research Center in the department of neurobiology, care sciences and society at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. “We encourage people to keep nighttime sleeping between seven to nine hours and to avoid frequent or excessive napping.”
Prior research has shown poor sleep may put people at higher risk for a range of chronic illnesses and conditions affecting heart and brain health. These include cardiovascular disease, dementia, diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 35% of U.S. adults say they get less than seven hours of sleep, while 3.6% say they get 10 or more hours.
Previous sleep duration studies show that sleeping too much or too little both may raise the risk for cardiovascular disease. But whether napping is good or bad has been unclear.
In the new study, researchers analyzed sleep patterns for 12,268 adults in the Swedish Twin Registry. Participants were an average of 70 years old at the start of the study, with no history of major cardiovascular events.
A questionnaire was used to collect data on nighttime sleep duration; daytime napping; daytime sleepiness; the degree to which they considered themselves a night person or morning person, based on the time of day they considered themselves most alert; and symptoms of sleep disorders, such as snoring and insomnia. Participants were followed for up to 18 years to track whether they developed any major cardiovascular problems, including heart disease and stroke.
People who reported sleeping between seven and nine hours each night were least likely to develop cardiovascular disease, a finding in keeping with prior research. Compared with that group, those who reported less than seven hours were 14% more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, and those who reported more than 10 hours were 10% more likely to develop cardiovascular disease.
Compared with people who said they never napped, those who reported napping up to 30 minutes were 11% more likely to develop cardiovascular disease. The risk increased by 23% if naps lasted longer than 30 minutes. Overall, those who reported poor sleep patterns or other sleep issues – including insomnia, heavy snoring, getting too much or too little sleep, frequent daytime sleepiness and considering themselves a night person – had a 22% higher risk
Study participants who reported less than seven hours of sleep at night and napping more than 30 minutes each day had the highest risk for cardiovascular disease – 47% higher than those reporting the optimal amount of sleep and no naps.
The jury is still out on whether naps affect cardiovascular risk across the lifespan, said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, center director for the Sleep Center of Excellence and an associate professor at Columbia University in New York City. She noted that the new research, which she was not involved in, was restricted to older adults.
Rather than trying to recoup sleep time by napping, people should try to develop healthier sleep habits that allow them to get an optimal amount of sleep at night, St-Onge said. This includes making sure the sleep environment is not too hot or cold or too noisy. Reducing exposure to bright light before going to sleep, not eating too late at night, getting enough exercise during the day and eating a healthful diet also help.
“Even if sleep is lost during the night, excessive napping is not suggested during the day,” Xu said. And, if people have persistent trouble getting enough sleep, they should consult a health care professional to figure out why, she said.
Long-term insomnia symptoms can pose a risk of poorer cognitive functioning later in life. This is why insomnia should be treated as early as possible, according to a new study.
The Helsinki Health Study at the University of Helsinki investigated the development of insomnia symptoms in midlife and their effects on memory, learning ability and concentration after retirement. The follow-up period was 15–17 years.
Wellness Secrets of a SuperAger 